Alban Berg wrote the opera Lulu, which is associated with the Pandora’s Box story.
Lulu is an unfinished opera by Austrian composer Alban Berg, based on Frank Wedekind’s dramas Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Berg began composing it in the 1920s, and the first two acts were performed in 1937, after his death. The completed version commonly performed today includes a third act reconstructed from surviving sketches.
The opera follows Wedekind’s Lulu rather than retelling Hesiod’s Greek myth. Its connection with Pandora comes through the source play and the title’s symbolic association with fascination, sexuality, and catastrophe.
Berg’s score uses modernist techniques, including a twelve-tone row, while retaining powerful dramatic and vocal writing. The opera is therefore an important link among German-language drama, early twentieth-century music, and the long cultural afterlife of the Pandora image.